CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — THE conventional wisdom about Syria is that nothing can be done. It is said that military action would be either perverse — bringing the jihadists in the opposition to power — or futile, failing to tip the balance against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Using force, it is argued, would also jeopardize other strategic objectives, like securing a lasting nuclear deal with Syria’s supporter Iran.

The trouble is that the conventional wisdom may be fatalism parading as realism and resignation masquerading as prudence.

Any realist needs to face two facts. First, absent the credible application of force against the Syrian regime, a negotiated transition leading to Mr. Assad’s departure is not going to happen. Despite the efforts of the United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, the peace talks in Geneva between the Syrian government and the opposition coalition have become a waste of time. The opposition forces have been weakened by military defeats, and Mr. Assad’s strategic advantage gives him no incentive to concede anything.

Second, if Mr. Assad is allowed to prevail in this conflict, he will reimpose his tyranny, and his forces will surely exterminate the remaining Sunni insurgents who make up most of the opposition. Obliterating his enemies, however, will not bring lasting peace. It will only further inflame hatreds. Sooner or later blood will flow again.

Though nominally committed to Mr. Assad’s overthrow, the United States, in doing so little to bring it about, is becoming complicit in his survival. Is there a realistic alternative?

Arming the rebels is not the answer. Providing weapons, as nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have done with their fundamentalist proxies in Syria, appears to have only increased civilian suffering without shifting the conflict in favor of the insurgents.

Neither is the solution to create humanitarian corridors or safe zones to protect civilians. Doing so will not succeed unless Western governments commit ground forces, and that won’t happen.

The only remaining option is to use force to deny Mr. Assad air superiority. Planes, drones and cyber operations could prevent his forces from using barrel bombs, cluster munitions and phosphorus weapons on civilian targets. An air campaign should not be used to provide support for rebel groups whose goals the West does not share. The aim would be to relieve the unrelenting pressure on the civilian population and force Mr. Assad to return to Geneva to negotiate a cease-fire.

Last year, the threat of force persuaded Mr. Assad to get rid of his chemical weapons. Applying force now could deny him the chance to bomb his way to victory. Mr. Assad can endure only if he crushes the insurgents. If he is denied victory, his eventual departure into exile becomes a matter of time.

A cease-fire in Syria would likely unleash a chaotic struggle for power, but it is better than slaughter. Syria is bound to look like Libya. International peacekeepers will be needed to prevent revenge killing by the opposition and former Assad allies alike.

The conventional wisdom holds that there are no “good guys” in the opposition, no one we actually want to win. There weren’t many good guys among the Balkan politicians in the late 1990s, either, but by working with them as a special presidential envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke did help bring a stop to the killing. If force were applied to leverage diplomacy in Syria, as the United States did in Bosnia, the dying could stop, refugees could return and negotiations could eventually lead either to partition or to a constitutional transition.

Given the near certainty that Russia would veto any United Nations Security Council authorization of air power, and that the United States Congress, if asked to authorize force, would likely turn President Obama down, stopping the war in Syria will stretch domestic and international legality. But if legality is not stretched, the killing will go on indefinitely.

Every piece of this proposal — using air power, forcing a cease-fire, putting in international peacekeepers — would be a test of presidential nerve and resolve. Military action risks confrontation with the Russians and is unpopular with a recession-weary public in the United States.

Above all, using force would make the president “own” the Syrian tragedy. So far he has tried to pretend he doesn’t have to. The fact is he owns it already. American inaction has strengthened Russia, Hezbollah and Iran. It has turned Syria into the next front in the war with Islamic extremism. And it has put in jeopardy the stability of Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey and risks leaving a failed state next door to Israel.

If the president already owns the deadly consequences of inaction, it is only prudent now to back diplomacy with force so that the consequences do not become deadlier still.

Nothing from Prof. Ignatieff about “our ally” Saudi Arabia backing Al Qaeda in Syria. Nothing about the threat of extinction of Alawaite and Christian minority communities in the event of a Sunni-Salafist-Saudi overthrow of Assad.

All we get is a simplistic Iran/Hezbollah/Russia axis of evil. We’ve seen this mythology before. It leads to military quagmires that we cannot afford and that earn us even more hostility from the warring parties. US taxpayers may want to encourage Middle Eastern nations to fight their own wars while the US works for peace and justice through foreign diplomacy, and providing food and medical care.

Recent history teaches that American meddling in Muslim civil wars busts our domestic budget and only fuels the bloodbath. The elite would-be shapers of American opinion repeatedly ignore this fundamental truth. Americans are exhausted by foreign wars and the messianic, neocon ideology that promotes them while oblivious to the lessons of the past decade.

Bloodthirsty necons like Ignatieff are basically outlaws and anarchists, opposed to the rule of law even as they pose as the voice of reason. This Harvard elitist writes, "...stopping the war in Syria will stretch domestic and international legality. But if legality is not stretched, the killing will go on indefinitely."

This is pure end-justifies-the-means anarchy, founded on a fallacy: that US military intervention will stop the bloodbath. Tell that to the people of Iraq.

Both the Israelis and the Saudis would like to see Uncle "Sap" pay the butcher's bill for taking the Sunni militants' side in an ongoing civil war in distant Syria. Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fox News would love to spend your tax dollars, and expend your children's blood, in Syria. The majority of Americans are adamantly opposed, but we are plutocracy, not a democracy.

NY TIMES READERS' COMMENTS REVEAL

BACKLASH AGAINST MORE NEOCON FOREIGN WARS

The following comments published by the New York Times on its website are representative of the majority of comments we read as of today at 3:15 pm Eastern Standard Time.

FRANK BRODHEAD: Mr. Ignatieff, like many commentators based at elite institutions and "think tanks," was given a platform by The Times and the mainstream media to advocate for using force in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002-03. Now he is back again, treated seriously by The Times as someone who has something useful to say about the problems in Syria. In the eyes of the mainstream media, Ignatieff suffers no penalty by having been so dramatically wrong the last time around. (And now he's a "professor of practice," whatever that is.) Rather than recycle this intellectual and ethical failure, The Times would do its readers a favor by giving a platform to those voices who saw through the pro-war rhetoric of the Bush/Cheney administration, and opposed the Iraq war. There are plenty of them out there, with lots to say.
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MARK THOMASON: The author (Ignatieff) was a big supporter of the Iraq War. He has admitted that and apologized in an article published August 5, 2007, in the Washington Post. He said in that it was important to learn from mistakes.

Here, he's doing it again. He didn't learn.

He writes, "The only remaining option is to use force."

That is because he sees it as the problem of the US. Why is it our problem? It is our fault because we don't stop it."Though nominally committed to Mr. Assad’s overthrow, the United States, in doing so little to bring it about, is becoming complicit in his survival."

What made us responsible to stop things in Syria? Why not worse places? Why Syria? That is the underlying neocon fallacy, that we have an obligation to fix wherever they have pointed to, just because not fixing it is our fault.

Furthermore, like the ultimate neocon error, he says we should do this illegally, because that is the only way we could do it. "stopping the war in Syria will stretch domestic and international legality. But if legality is not stretched, the killing will go on indefinitely."

So we must commit crimes because in Syria both sides will go on killing. How about other places? No, just Syria.

When read closely, this just does not make sense. It is nonsense.
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EVERYMAN:

Oh dear, are you at it again? Remember this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/05EMPIRE.html

Followed by this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05iraq-t.html

Leading to this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/world/americas/04canada.html

Americans don't want any more Middle East wars, and neither do Canadians. You advocate "force"? How about you go fight?

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PINTOKS: Do tell, how many members of the Ignatieff family does the author offer up for this "prudent" use of force, or does the author prefer, as in Iraq and Afghanistan to again leave that to the little people? Ignatieff in the last decade just can't find a Mideast conflict he's not willing to send your family and friends off to die in.
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WOODSBELDAU: ...There are 150,000 Russian nationals in Syria plus a major naval base. The issue of what Mr. Assad does may have more to do with Russia's perception of its strategic interests, than with President Assad's desires for his country. In the early stages of the Arab Spring Mr. Assad offered negotiations, a new constitution and elections. Then violence started. Was the violence caused by the Assad government's desire to punish the people for demonstrating or was it the result of provocateurs that had no interest in the welfare of the Syrian people, but were provoking the government to act with brutal force that evoked a counterforce and led to civil war? Now that negotiations appear to be getting underway and the parties have been signaled that they must seriously start talking, it would be a terribly counterproductive act for the US to unilaterally use force.
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HOWARD: Oh, here we go again. Michael Ignatieff, that great humanitarian, paragon of clarity of thought, mouthpiece for George Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq, who was so very sure that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he would sell them to international terrorists. He now advocates a US attack on Syria. Mr. Ignatieff, please go and check with the myriad of dead Iraqis before you push for another war. Or better yet, go back to Canada. It eludes me how people like you imagine that foreigners sowing death can bring peace to Syria's long suffering people. It also leaves me speechless that the N.Y. Times would give you op ed space to publish such nonsense.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Dear Mr. Hoffmanre: Luther the Antinomian? (see the comments section following our blog post on Martin Heidegger)You mentioned that in England even the yeoman was sovereign. That did not prevent the Upper Classes from kidnabbing the poor and sending them to the colonies as slaves.One Question: How do you reconcile the supremacism, mass murder, lack of love and unforgiveness of the Old Testament theology with the Prince of Peace? It seems to me that the Talmud is the direct descendant of the Old Testament.Sincerely,H.L., M.D.________Dear Dr. H. L.In the political theory and theology of the Puritans (regarding the majority Protestants only), and among the category of clergymen known in Britain (mainly during and after the reign of Charles II), as "non conforming divines," the concept of the individual as having inalienable rights apart from the monarchy or any earthly government, was very strong indeed. A direct legacy of this philosophy can be found in our Declaration of Independence, not withstanding the fact that poor whites suffered demonization and criminalization in Britian, which led to their enslavement on land, and as I recently tried to demonstrate in an issue of Revisionist History newsletter, on sea.As for the Old Testament, its warfare was directed not at gentiles generally, but against those tribes and nations that used magica sexualis to worship false gods. You will find the distinction in the Hebrew terms ger and nokri; i.e. benevolent aliens and enemy aliens.The major difference between the Babylonian Talmud and the Old Testament is that the former is a manual of racial self-worship, whereas the latter repeatedly excoriates Israel and the Israelites for their faithlessness, pride and transgressions. Recall that in the Book of Hosea God equates Israel with a whore. Prophet Isaiah thundered imprecations against Israel to such an extent that the Talmud says Isaiah was killed and celebrates his murder. Hence, Isaiah is one of the prophets Jesus referenced as having been murdered by the Pharisaic spirit within Israel, and you will recall that Isaiah was one of the most eminent of the prophets before the coming of John the Baptist. In Judaism's Strange Gods I give citations from sacred rabbinic texts that degrade and defame not only Isaiah but Old Testament patriarchs such as Noah and even Moses himself. One of the most virulent hoaxes of history is the one put forth by Douglas Reed, and before him, the Nazi leadership, that rabbinic Judaism is an Old Testament religion. It is in fact the quintessential anti-Old Testament religion.If you wish to see this fact thoroughly documented and know for certain the difference between the Old Testament and the Talmud of Babylon, you might consider studyingThe Talmud Tested: Comparing the Religion of Judaism with the Religion of Moses, by Professor Alexander McCaul.And of course the bane of our existence, the Money Power, would not have one-tenth the power it has in the world today if Christian Israel harkened to both the Old Testament and New Testament proscriptions against the taking of interest on loans, as this writer has demonstrated in the book, Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not. In order for the "Rothschild Judaism" that is the éminence grise of the financial system today, to operate, it had to nullify the Old Testament laws against usury; this nullification being as old as the child-molestation advocate and so-called "good Pharisee," Hillel, who first issued a "prozbul" nullifying the Deuteronomic ban on unjust loans.For what it is worth, I have spent more than eighteen years of my life studying the Talmud of Babylon and cognate rabbinic texts, and the more I study the more I see what Nicholas Donin, Vincent Ferrer, Martin Luther, Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, Alexander McCaul and Fathers Prainitis and McNabb discerned.The stubborn survival of the cockamamie dogma of the Nazis, Douglas Reed and many others concerning the Old Testament, cannot long endure among reasonable men and women when exposed to the light of truth. This dogma is, in the final analysis, a thinly veiled gnostic attack on Jesus Christ Himself who, without the Old Testament, becomes "The Christ" of the New Age.Jesus and the Apostles of the New Testament favorably quoted the Old Testament literally hundreds of times. If it is a book of evil, then so too is Jesus Christ evil. Our Lord cannot be separated from the Word of God that preceded His Incarnation! People who execrate the Old Testament should be candid enough to admit this fact, so that we may proceed with this debate from an accurate understanding of where that execration ultimately leads.

Friday, February 14, 2014

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: Today, Feb. 14, is the 69th anniversary of the Allied fire bombing holocaust against the art city of Dresden, Germany, where upwards of 100,000 civilians were incinerated, and the priceless art treasures of the historic city were forever obliterated. The Hollywood movie “Monuments Men” is brimming with self-righteous portrayals of American soldiers as the saviors of art works stolen by the “evil Germans.” Hollywood puts a higher price on aesthetic artifacts than on human life, in that the incinerated civilians of all the major cities of Germany do not register on the conscience of the producers of this pompous “Monuments Men.” Even if we limit concern to aesthetics alone, the savage carpet-bombing of these mostly medieval German cities wiped out a fairy tale architecture of awesome beauty. The saturation incendiary bombing by the RAF and the US Army Air Force was one of the most barbarian assaults in the history of the West. Because the victims were the “wicked” German people however, this holocaust is barely a blip on the moral outrage screen of our patrician “Good War” enthusiasts. In terms of art, what the Allies destroyed in Dresden alone, surpasses by a factor of a thousand what the Nazis appropriated. —Michael Hoffman

Martin Heidegger is a far more complex philosopher than the following hysterical screed from the Jewish Daily Forward (see below) lets on. Most subversive of the profile in the Judaic publication is the fact that Heidegger was the disciple of the pro-Christian Judaic thinker Edmund Husserl; and Heidegger’s long-time lover was the Judaic author Hannah Arendt, whose book on Adolf Eichmann created a bitter controversy when she argued that the Nazi officer did not represent any special category of evil, a point that would be impossible for any major intellectual to make today, assuming they cared about their career and reputation.

We disagree with Heidegger on certain points, including his derogatory attitude toward the Old Testament and his mistaken notion that the Ashkenazi and Sephardic peoples were of Semitic ethnicity, a staple fiction of the Nazi weltanschaung (it is more likely that it was the ten tribes of Israel that went north to found Europe itself: — cf. Steven M. Collins, Israel’s Tribes Today).

Heidegger’s appeal to an irrational typologyas an antidote to the sordid materialism of the modern world, is born of völkisch ethics divorced from the laws of the Bible, which Howard B. Rand, in his indispensable Digest ofDivine Law, enumerates; and which formed the very root of the early American Republic and the enormously attractive freedom and order it engendered. Völkisch values can indeed be an asset, when they comprise a natural law adjunct of the revealed Christian religion. The novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky are a prime example of the proper application of the volkstum spirit (in the Anglo-Saxon sphere this translates as the spirit and values of the yeomanry. Absent Martin Luther’s antinomianism, the Anglo-Saxon yeomanry more often than not were steeped in a Biblical ethic, as evidenced by the people of the thirteen colonies of British America).

For all that, we cannot help but admire the fact that Heidegger, who was the most eminent existential philosopher of the 20th century, never completely repented or recanted his advocacy of Germanindependence from the degenerate modern zeitgeist. His defiance continues to bug the traditional enemies of Truth to no end. They ceaselessly argue that all who dissent from the tenets of Holocaustianity and Israeli claims to an exclusive right to racial-nationalist chauvinism in the wake of Auschwitz, are “crackpot pseudo-intellectuals.” Yet even the most rabid detractor of Martin Heidegger could not credibly stake a claim to such a charge concerning the author of the magisterial Being and Time (1927); ergo, they must batter his prestige and blacken his name in other, underhanded ways, as they have attempted to do with Chaucer, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Dickens, Ezra Pound, Paul de Man, and all luminaries of our civilization who are denounced as “antisemitic” moral lepers by the self-appointed superiors not only of mankind, but above God himself (cf. BT Bava Metzia 59B).

We also note that in the midst of the latest howls against Heidegger, up pops the pioneering homicidal gas chamber skeptic Robert Faurisson, long consigned to the rubbish heap of history by the usual suspects, but who will not go gently into their dark night. From the disciples of Heidegger to a French-African satirist of international prominence (Dieudonne), Dr. Faurisson continues to electrify those who dare to question the consensus, and reject the legends to which the Establishment has conferred its supposed infallible imprimatur.

Martin Heidegger's Black Notebooks Reignite Charges of Anti-Semitism

Philosopher Was Compromised By Involvement With Nazis

By Robert Zaretsky

The Jewish Daily Forward | February 14, 2014

On this side of the Atlantic, the imminent publication in Germany of Martin Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” (“Schwarzen Hefte”) has caused few if any ripples. For better or worse, the philosopher who theorized about “absence from the world” has been largely absent from our world.

Yet in Europe, a surf-like pounding in newspapers and magazines has accompanied the debate over the book’s significance. Several phrases leaked from the book have reintroduced some of the great questions about Heidegger: Namely, was he anti-Semitic and, if so, was his existential philosophy fatally compromised?

Oddly, the waves of controversy have crashed with greater fury in France than Heidegger’s native Germany, not to mention the Anglo-American world. Of course, this in part reflects the waning, but still important role intellectuals play in French cultural and political life. This interest in turn inevitably spills into the national press, whose front pages have carried numerous interviews and columns on the controversy, leading one literary critic, Eric Aeschimann, to announce the arrival of the “new Heidegger Affair.”

As Aeschimann’s phrase implies, there have been older Heidegger affairs — in fact, there has been a series, which tend to erupt every decade or so. The first dates from the immediate postwar period when France, scarcely liberated from one German occupation, threw open its doors to a new and different occupation. This was not a military occupation but an intellectual one whose phenomenal nature, in every sense of the term, still stuns unsuspecting students of the era.

Rather than launching Stukas and Panzers, the new invasion employed the obscurely portentous language of German phenomenology to pound the French, or at least a good number of intellectuals, into submission. Of course, the strategist behind this campaign was none other than Heidegger. In 1946, a denazification committee at the University of Freiburg, reviewing Heidegger’s decision to join the Nazi Party, and his activities as the university’s rector between 1933-1934, decided to ban him from teaching. Perhaps the most damning witness was the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had reluctantly concluded that his former friend’s manner of thinking was “unfree, dictatorial and incapable of communication.” (One wonders if, as he wrote this letter, Jaspers recalled the conversation he had with Heidegger soon after Hitler came to power. When Jaspers demanded to know how someone as “uneducated” as Hitler could rule Germany, Heidegger replied: “It’s not a question of education; just look at his marvelous hands”).

Yet, it was the hand offered by the French philosopher Jean Beaufret that pulled Heidegger from the professional exile imposed by the Freiburg committee. Shortly after Jean-Paul Sartre, whose own thought was inspired by Heidegger’s work, gave his celebrated public talk “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Beaufret contacted Heidegger for his reaction. While Heidegger replied that Sartre had completely misunderstood his writings, this was less important than the public’s misunderstanding of Beaufret’s motivations.

As the Heidegger scholar Richard Wolin notes, Beaufret, who had fought with the Resistance, soon gravitated towards the dark planet of Holocaust denial. In a letter he wrote to the notorious negationist Robert Faurisson, Beaufret reassured him that he, like Faurisson, had “traveled the same path” and had been “considered suspect for having expressed the same doubts” about the gas chambers. In the same letter, Beaufret congratulated himself for having shared his views with Faurisson, and never committing them to paper. The same cannot be said for his work on behalf of Heidegger: Beaufret morphed into a veritable public relations firm for the Nazi thinker, serving as his privileged interlocutor and interpreter in France.

While Sartre soon distanced himself from Heidegger’s writings, other and younger postwar intellectuals like Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault were drawn to them; they became the darling of self-described revolutionaries on the left rather than reactionaries on the right. For good reason, Heidegger chuckled that when the French talk philosophy, they think in German.

Only toward the end of the century did French intellectuals begin to grasp how odd a bedfellow Heidegger truly was. They had applauded his critique of modernity and man’s alienation from a world dominated by science and technology, but only later became appalled by his embrace of irrationality and scorn for the humanist tradition. In 1987, a former student of Heidegger’s, Victor Farias, published a book whose title — “Heidegger et le nazisme” — reflected the damning contents within. Based on thorough archival research, Farias revealed that Heidegger’s decision to join the Nazi Party was not, as his defenders claimed, opportunistic, but instead principled.

More intriguingly, Farias claimed that Heidegger quit his position as rector at Freiburg just a year after he was named not because, as Heidegger later claimed, he was shocked to learn the true nature of the Nazi agenda. Instead, Farias argues, Heidegger stepped down when he realized that the original purity of the Nazi agenda had been diluted for political reasons.

The book sparked a firestorm in France. Francois Fédier, who had picked up the torch from the recently deceased Beaufret, flew to Heidegger’s defense, while others like Jacques Derrida flew in a different direction, conceding Heidegger’s philosophical affinities to Nazism but insisting that only those steeped in his writings can take the true measure of this thought. (Not only did this, in Derrida’s eyes, disqualify Farias, but also reviewers like me.) Yet others like André Glucksmann, while they found Farias’s analysis wanting, agreed that the value of Heidegger’s thought, and not just his politics, was deeply suspect.

The controversy, which revealed that a growing number of French philosophers were no longer thinking in German, was repeated nearly a decade later with the publication of Emmanuel Faye’s “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy.” Faye offered a more refined and rich reading of Heidegger’s thought than did Farias, but one even more damning. He traced the connections between the völkisch themes in both Heidegger and Nazi ideology and the shared conviction that only a return to a presumably earlier and more authentic existence can save us from the spiritual wasteland wrought by modernity.

Nothing short of a revolution, both for the individual and for society, could make an adequate clearing in the world to allow for being to, well, once again become. Heidegger, concluded Faye, understood that this revolution was garbed in the brown uniforms of Nazi Storm Troopers.

Blasted by Fédier and his followers in 2005, Faye — in a recent essay for Le Monde — reminds his readers of what Farias and other researchers long ago documented: Heidegger was anti-Semitic. In a letter to a colleague in 1935, he deplored the presence of “Jewish and half-Jewish students” in his classes, and in his seminars declared that “Semitic nomads” were impervious to the German spirit, which moreover was threatened by what he called the process of “Jewification.”

Warning that we cannot judge the “Black Notebooks” until they are published, Faye nevertheless notes that the published excerpts blacken the already dark portrait of Heidegger. In these fragments, Heidegger refers to a “world Jewry” with a “pronounced talent for calculation.” Such a people, for Heidegger, are ontologically challenged: Unlike the German nation, Jews will always be “uprooted from Being-in-the World.” In a word, the Jew is persona non grata not just in Hitler’s world, but in Heidegger’s world as well.***

“Will there be anything new in the “Black Notebooks?” scholars have been asking. While we wait to answer this question, we might also ask if there will be a truly new perspective adopted by Heidegger’s stalwart defenders in France.

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of history at The Honors College at the University of Houston and is the author of “A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning” (Harvard University Press).

Gallery 395A is tucked away in a corner on the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago’s modern wing...which contains...Marc Chagall’s “White Crucifixion” (1938)...the Chagall painting has been making international news. In interviews with Francesca Ambrogetti and Sergio Rubin for the 2010 biography El Jesuita, Pope Francis identified “White Crucifixion,” which depicts a Jewish Jesus, wearing a tallit instead of a loincloth, as his favorite work of art. “He likes us, he really does,” Tweeted Miriam Shaviv, a columnist for Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, about the pope.

But there’s more to the painting than “owning” Jesus as a Jew. Surrounding Jesus, we see a synagogue, a Torah scroll and a shtetl burning, as armed men march carrying red flags. And in the bottom-right corner, the Wandering Jew, donning a blue cap and a green coat, lugs a sack as he trudges past the smoking Torah.

That the chief executive of the Catholic Church has an affinity for a painting that was created by a Russian-Jewish artist and also includes the symbol of the eternal wanderer, who was punished for abusing Jesus and became the pretext for centuries of anti-Semitism, is drawing a range of reactions.

"...“I know nothing of the pope’s taste, so I have no idea why he likes that painting,” said Matthew Baigell, who is professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University and has published extensively on Jewish artists.

Marc Michael Epstein, professor of religion at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., sees things differently. The notion of a Jewish Jesus and its reference to Jews and other marginalized groups is very appealing post-Vatican II, he said....

Chicago’s (Jesuit) Loyola University Museum of Art is exhibiting some of Chagall’s work in “Graven Images: Marc Chagall’s Bible Illustrations” through June 16.... Jonathan Canning, senior curator at the Loyola museum...declined to comment specifically on the pope’s aesthetic preferences...Canning says that Chagall was clearly introducing a new interpretation of the crucifixion..."

(End quote)

Afterword by Michael Hoffman

Tedious, strait-jacketed thinking is the signifier in this report (“He likes us, he really does,” Tweeted Miriam Shaviv, a columnist for Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, about the pope.)

Actually Miriam, if the 2010 biography of the pope is accurate, he doesn't like you, or the Judaic people collectively. The assumption that because someone, in this case Pope Francis, is a shill for the Pharisees, he is thereby "pro-Jewish," is platitudinous rubbish.

Artist Marc Chagall depicts Christ being crucified while dressed in the garb of a Pharisee. What would the world think of the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem if he admired a painting of a "Jew" being "gassed in Auschwitz" wearing the uniform of a Nazi?

Chagall, in his delirium, portrays the victim of the Pharisees dressed as a Pharisee. Chagall's depiction is a familiar Talmudic trope. It constitutes a disfigurement of Jesus Christ, who stated (in Matthew 23:5-7), that the long tassels (tzitzit) extending from the bottom of the prayer shawl (tallit), were a fixture of prideful display by the Pharisees. In "White Crucifixion" Chagall depicts Jesus garbed in this very attire, with long fringes hanging from the bottom of the garment clearly visible.

If this is a favorite painting of Pope Francis — Rome's "Peter Romanus” — then he has some explaining to do. For now it appears he is pandering to political correctness of the most virulent type, in order to be seen as hip, kosher and in tune with the world. Someone needs to remind His Holiness that the man on the Cross was none of those things.

A group of rabbis, including the founder of the far-right Our Land of Israel party, wrote in an open to letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that he had declared war against God through his current mediation efforts between Israel and Palestinian negotiators, and said he must cease such activities to avoid divine punishment.

The letter was sent by the Committee to Save the Land and People of Israel, founded by Rabbi Sholom Dov Wolpo, who also founded the Our Land of Israel party, as an activist group to oppose political accords with the Palestinians involving territorial concessions.

“Your incessant efforts to expropriate integral parts of our Holy Land and hand them over to Abbas’s terrorist gang, amount to a declaration of war against the Creator and Ruler of the universe! For G-d awarded the entire Land of Israel to our ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in order that they bequeath it, as an everlasting inheritance, to their descendants, the Jewish people, until the end of all time,” the letter reads.

The rabbis argue that Kerry’s plans endangers Israeli Jews by bringing them within close range of potential rocket and missile fire from the West Bank should it be ceded by Israel to the Palestinians.

“If you continue on this destructive path, you will ensure your everlasting disgrace in Jewish history for bringing calamity upon the Jewish people,” continued the rabbis

“By the power of our Holy Torah, we admonish you to cease immediately all efforts to achieve these disastrous agreements – in order to avoid severe Heavenly punishment for everyone involved,” they threatened.

The letter was signed by Rabbi Wolpo, along with four other rabbis including Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, the founder and Chairman of the Temple Institute; Rabbi Yigal Pizam, the Dean of a Yeshiva and a leader of the Chabad community in the Haifa neighborhood of Kiryat Shmuel; Rabbi Gedalya Axelrod, the emeritus head of the Haifa Rabbinic Court; and Rabbi Ben Tziyon Grossman from the town of Migdal Haemek.

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Michael Hoffman's Afterword

The religion of Judaism = self worship

"God" in the rabbinic context = Judaic men

Cursing the gentiles = nothing new (see below*)

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*The rabbinic curse on gentiles like John Kerry is 2,000 years old - and still in force! The proof is here:

Monday, February 03, 2014

Denied for centuries, this bigoted curse from the misnamed “Amidah blessings” is proved by Michael Hoffman, using the forensic methods of exhaustive research and detailed documentation which are a hallmark of his revisionist pursuit of truth wherever it may lead.

Revisionist History newsletter no. 70 explores Talmudism’s murderous ritual curse on the Christians, a curse which has echoed perpetually down the corridors of time since at least the days of Rabbi Gamliel, and continues in our time. Citing the Babylonian Talmud, cognate sacred rabbinic texts and the heretofore clandestine statements of the rabbis themselves, Hoffman offers incontrovertible evidence of the eternal hostility which Orthodox Judaism harbors for western civilization, which it ritually curses as malkhut zadon (the "empire of insolence").

Also included in this issue is a survey of the secret and ancient alliance between Judaism and Islam.

The American Right imagines that Judaism is united to the West culturally and has good will toward the U.S. in particular. The truth of the matter is very different, as revisionist historian Hoffman demonstrates with his usual exactitude.

Also in this issue: Black Journalist Exposes Anti-White Hollywood Movie, “12 Years a Slave.”

Revisionist History is a hard copy publication for subscribers. Contents do not appear online.

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NEW AUDIO CD:

AN INTRODUCTION TO MARTIN LUTHER'S VIEWS ON JUDAISM

Formerly available only as the first CD in the 9 CD set of Hoffman reading from Luther's book, we are offering this CD as a stand alone product for individual purchase by those who do not wish to purchase the whole set of 9 CDs consisting of Hoffman's recitation of Luther's book (if you purchased that set then don't buy this CD, because you already own it). Hoffman clarifies Luther's position and presents the pros and cons of Luther's teachings on Judaism and Judaic persons. Outstanding nuggets of revisionist history will be found here! Approx. 45 minutes. Audio CD.